#62 Five Steps to scale automation using Citizen Developers

Hi and welcome to another episode of the Process and Automation Podcast. As always, I'm here with Arno, and today we will look again at one of our favorite topics, low-code and low-code development, and very much guide for you to learn more about scaling automation using citizen developers. Most organizations, as you know, are already embracing intelligent automation as the critical component of their digital transformation strategy, and some have already developed a Center of Excellence, COE, to ensure that automation programs bring really high impact results. But Center of Excellence teams are often a small and a shared resource that very often reach sort of capacity and bandwidth problems, creating a major roadblock to scaling automation across the organizations. And yeah, enlisting business users as so-called citizen developers It's, yeah, it's the next step in evolving that automation programs within the organization. Expanding automation to the business teams, yeah, allows organizations to leverage process and application expertise while really dramatically expanding automation development capacity. And yeah, today we will look into this step by step. Effectively the 5 steps. And yeah, you will learn about scaling automation with citizen developers. Arno, let's, let's kick off with step number 1.

Thanks, Sascha. Yeah, that was a good intro. I think what we're looking for is we are looking for sponsorship from leadership. So that's effectively our first step. You know, as we know, Recruiting leaders as your sponsors is really vital to ensure participation of people within your program. Otherwise, automation can just become a sort of a sideline piecemeal endeavor. And business users, of course, have their day jobs. So making sure that their sort of management is on board is key to the success of using citizen developers to scale your automation initiatives. So the sort of guidance here is to meet one or two departmental leaders, go out there and really understand their objectives, share how automation would help them achieve their goals, for example, and work with them to include automation as part of their key objectives. Also, once you've got that functional leadership or that departmental leadership on board, it is really time to gain some executive decades of sponsorship. You know, this instance, you know, be prepared to highlight how automation aligns to the company-level objectives, for example, and also how you intend to enlist citizen developers with inside the program and also outline alignment with the business leaders and, you know, what sort of support you would need in order to enable a program that will enable and empower citizen developers. So again, that first step is really just to enlist the sponsors for leadership.

All right. Yeah. So that brings me to step number 2, and that step is all around aligning on outcomes. And yeah, it seems to be very important, or it is very important, that shared objectives and key results are absolutely necessary to bridge the silos between the teams in, in your organization. And setting goals across teams that include that automation and highlight its benefits will motivate people. To participate. So that's really, really super important. While launching these new bots and automations may seem like a good target, but focusing on the actual business impact will achieve even better alignment, especially with the leadership, and inspire them to rally behind you. So improving customer service by reducing turnaround time, driving more sales by delivering faster services, or improving agility with a digital workforce. Those kind of points can all be achieved by getting citizen developers into, into your organization or enabling your team to become citizen developers. And yeah, working with your functional leaders to set the objectives, the objectives that align with the most pressing goals. That's super important. So start small with the goals such as saved hours, lowered costs, or reduced errors. So those kind of KPIs, and then take that forward and ensure that your executive sponsors have at least, yeah, one of these shared objectives and key results. And yeah, everyone should have that really on their plate to help the whole citizen development team and get the whole process around citizen development really up and running and get that running smoothly.

Yeah, so the third step really is then to plan for scalability. So obviously we've looked at getting leadership on board, then focusing on these outcomes and these goals. But the next step really is then to plan for the, you know, the growth and how can we scale this across the business. And, you know, again, once you have your sponsors in place and shared goals, you know, you need to now evolve your automation program for scalability. And, you know, the quickest thing and the initial thing you should do is define the training program for your citizen developers. You know, many RPA and low-code vendors out there provide free learning paths. So that's a good thing to look out for. Of course, you can work with your RPA and your low-code partners as well, people like ourselves, or You know, we've got on our Automation Guys website a membership offer where once you've subscribed, you actually get a sandbox environment where you can do sort of self-training. So these are the sort of things that when you wanna scale, you actually wanna open this up to a lot more people. And then generally, you know, you wanna create some standards for the bots you create, for example, or, you know, for the overall sort of program at a whole, you know, how do people do specific things? What is the sort of best practices for that? So these are things that you need to put in place to ensure good scalability. You know, good governing rules needs to come into play as well. So people really understand, you know, what the boundaries are when they start creating automations. And again, these could be RPA automations, building robots, or it could be low-code automations using sort of conventional workflow tools. And again, you know, like I say, you want to update your policies, and that should contain the criteria required to build and run these bots. And lastly, what you want to do is also you want to set up a steering committee to ensure you are making progress. And a steerco is a very, very good tool or very good instrument to ensure that you are moving in the right direction and you are moving at a good pace, you know, to ensure that you achieve your scalability goals.

Yeah, cool. Thank you, Arnoud. Yeah, that was a really good step number 3. The next one is all about participating and make that in your company really easy and rewarding. So it's really exciting step actually, because we recommend that hosting an introduction to automation session. So that's, that's important to be, be sure you record it so others can then watch the recording to learn more about automation. And so in this introduction to automation session, it's all about getting everyone in the company excited about automation and what a digital workforce, what automation can bring to their life, to their department, to assist them with all the work they do. And that participation can be easily shared with ready-to-go use cases, bot templates, automation templates, best practices, and other sort of policy documentions. But it's really, really important that it is easy to digest and accessible so people can look at their sort of their leisure. And yeah, and to ensure long-term success, create an incentive program within the teams, within the departments, and really share these successes and publicize the wins and really go big with that one. So because that keeps that excitement going. Departments suddenly then want this kind of automation as well. Yeah, send weekly or monthly emails announcing when people have finished automation training or have achieved the first automations, created their first bot, hit a certain target like we mentioned earlier. Those kind of KPIs are very important for leadership and for teams. Yeah, have they hit those kind of targets and won a prize for their automation? Yeah, so that's, that's super important. And have the sponsor in your company announce these recent automation wins in the next sort of meetings, all-hands meetings you do in your company. And there's so many ways to inspire the whole team and inspire them long-term and draw in other employees to build automations and create more bot implementations. So yeah, so with that kind of excitement, it will be, will be very successful.

Yeah, no, thank you, Sasha. And that brings us really to, to the last step. So, you know, we've just, and just as a kind of quick roundup, just for that, that context again. So we've got the leadership in place, we've defined our sort of our objectives. We plan for the scalability. And then of course, you brought in the, the reward element here, which is very important for people to get recognition. You know, everybody wants to have recognition for, for the innovative stuff they do. And again, the sort of final step is really just to direct the course of movement. And we have spoken about a center of excellence in previous podcasts, but a center of excellence is really a very important tool you have at your disposal to maintain control and governance across all of your automation activities. Now, if we look in this example, just regard— well, in just at RPA specific, we want to monitor, you know, a progress across the bot lifecycle, and that includes development, testing, and also rolling out to production. And again, what you want to do is you want to ensure progress is being made by setting examples of how long each of these stages should take. How long should you take to build a bot? How long should it take to really test one and roll it out? And then you want to ensure that milestones are created and regularly reviewed. You want to sort of make sure that there is a sort of progress. And again, once bots are actually in production, Monitor the bot activity, you know, meet with your steering committee regularly to ensure that bots are moving through the lifecycle, you know, and compare progress towards your objectives and course correct where necessary, you know, change your direction. And again, you know, sort of be their guide and also host these how-to sessions to enlighten people on, you know, the progress of things and, you know, what everybody else is doing. And again, you know, unleashing this power of automation, wide automation, you know, automation requires, you know, really a distribution of effort by many parties. And, you know, only with a sort of distributed operating model can you truly achieve the scalability that you're after and also reap the benefits, you know, of such a program. And again, you know, by creating a business unit-led center of excellence, or, you know, some people refer to this as bot factories, for example, you can distribute bot development and management across the organization. So this doesn't just have to be an IT-led initiative. So again, if, you know, if you offload that bot management and local reporting that allows the sort of global center of excellence to concentrate on larger-scale cross-functional strategic automation projects, you know, that holistically sort of touches many other areas of the business.

Yeah, awesome. Yeah, so that was the overview of the 5 steps you can take to really scale automation using citizen developers. And yeah, it's very clear that citizen developers, it's super important for companies because normal high-code developers, they are not available to do all the implementations we want to do, all the automations we want to do. So it really makes sense to bring that out to other functions in the business to really improve all the departments, all the, all in, on all the functions themselves, so they know what they can do with all the different, in all the different areas. So it's super important to, to look at that topic. I think it will, it will be a growing topic. We're just at the beginning of automation in general, and it is a key key element of succeeding with automation in organizations, small and large really. Yeah. So taking the next step, as Arno mentioned earlier, is maybe to look at our community, theautomationguys.net, and have a look at the membership options there. So with the sandbox, you can just get going with automation straight away, fiddle around, take a use case you have at work and experiment with that, and then later on maybe bring it back into the organization, talk with the Center of Excellence, propose an idea for automation, and bring that excitement with those automations into your department, into the whole organization.

Yeah, no, that's great, Sascha. And we always get asked by people, in layman's terms, you know, what is a citizen developer? And these days we see anybody that's got curiosity as a citizen developer, anybody that, you know, we said in, I think in one of the previous episodes, anybody that can, you know, create a spreadsheet, for example, they almost immediately qualify as being a citizen developer because that is how easy it is to get started. Of course, there's many features and Excel that is quite advanced, you know, and granted, you know, lots of people get experts in Excel because they go deeper and then they discover, you know, how Excel could help them with their day-to-day jobs, for example. And it's no different to getting started with building your own software bots where you get started very quickly, you're curious about something, you create a very simple bot, that reads an email, downloads an attachment, take the data from the attachment and key it into another system or key it into another spreadsheet that helps you collate some data. And, you know, and that's, you know, as long as you've got that sort of curiosity to dig a bit deeper, like Sasha mentioned, we've got the sandbox. That's a nice self-contained environment. You can play around there. It's got an email account as well. So you should be able to email yourself and email yourself some examples. Maybe some attachments that you want to push through a bot. And this will sort of help you to, to really stimulate the thinking on, you know, how can I bring robotic software into my organization? It could, could well be that you want to show off your skills, you want to build a simple bot, and you want to show that to your line manager. Perhaps you work in finance and there's some repetitive work that you want to do, and this could be a great starting point. And these are the people that we are talking about, is sort of the, the business users that are quite competent in, you know, doing day-to-day activities, you know, using Excel, other systems. And these low-code platforms to create bots are very, very simple to use. The key is just to get started and to start experimenting. And, you know, there's no better place to get started in a nice predefined sandbox. And then the 5 steps we discussed today, I think the importance there is just the fact that when you actually get citizen developers, you know, the people in departments, and you get all of those people together and various people start to create automations and various people start experimenting what automation can bring into your business, that's when you actually realize the benefits of it because that's when it sort of scales. You know, it's those hours or those days that that you really save across the board. And that's where you see the maximum, I guess, from a business perspective, the maximum return of investment for your implementations of, say, your software cost, but also, you know, the savings in, you know, people's hours. You know, they can spend more time doing things that is beneficial to the benefit or to the business. So it all kind of links together. And I think, you know, hopefully that people are enlightened now. But with this concept of a citizen developer, it's not a scary thing. You tend to not even need to be technically minded. Like I said, all you need to have is sort of just curiosity, a place to actually create your first bot and really just build on top of that, get people involved. You know, show your hard work to people, you know, and hopefully, you know, more people will jump on and actually, you know, join that movement. And, you know, and that's the path to sort of getting a sort of automation-first culture within your business.

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